August 28, 1997, Budapest, Hungary
Dear Folks, My last message to you was mailed out just yesterday, but I’d better get another one going, because this is going to be an eventful month! I’ll try to write as I go, otherwise I’ll never remember everything.
I’m in a student dorm room at the Budapest University of Economics. The sun and smog are pouring in the window, as is the roar of morning traffic. (Living on the farm doesn’t prepare me for living in the urban world. I can never believe how NOISY and SMELLY cities are!.) Outside the window I can see yellow trams crossing two bridges over the Danube River. Inside the room my dear friend Joan Davis is sitting on the other bed, pecking away at her computer — a little Newton, from which she is sending faxes via her cell-phone. (I’m impressed. It never occurred to me that you could do that.)
The Balaton Group is assembling for our annual meeting. Most of the Europeans will come on trains today. Those of us with long plane flights arrived yesterday and went out to dinner together last night. Chirapol from Thailand, Carlos from Costa Rica, Lucia from Taiwan. It’s so GOOD to see them again!
Each person who comes to Balaton is a sustainability leader with a great mind, heart and soul. The best way to describe the meeting would be to describe all of them, but there are too many. So I’ll just introduce you to a few. Last night I sat across the table from Ruta Vaicunaite, a young woman who seems to be in the middle of all environmental action in Lithuania. She’s just been asked to coordinate a study of Lithuanian agriculture and to make policy suggestions for making farms there more sustainable. That subject is right up my alley, of course, and since this is Ruta’s first Balaton meeting, I told her which other members of the group would most be able to help her. That’s basically our purpose — to come together from around the world and help each other.
Next to her sat Genady Golubev, a geologist and geographer and old friend from the days when he and I were both visiting scientists in Vienna at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Since then Genady has been the research director at UNEP in Nairobi, and has been involved in climate change and other global-level environmental science projects all over the world. Now he’s back in Moscow, trying to weather the changes in his country and to hold together his university department and students.
On my left sat Miklos Persanyi, the director of the Budapest Zoo. Miklos is another omni-capable person — he has degrees in biology and economics and worked in the Hungarian environment ministry when it first got started. Then he went to London and the European Development Bank. Then he heard about the zoo position. He grew up next to that zoo, and he used to dream, when he was a boy, of being its director. So he applied, though he had no background for the job, and his dream came true. He’s transforming a traditional European zoo into a modern one, with as few cages as possible and a mission to educate the public about biodiversity and conservation. He’s having a ball.
This afternoon we’ll load ourselves into a bus and head for Lake Balaton, an hour and a half from here. We’ll drive through the dry, hot Hungarian countryside, covered with ripening corn and sunflowers. Our meeting will formally start this evening. I can hardly wait to get out of the city!
September 5, 1997, Csopak, Hungary
Whew!
I shouldn’t have waited so long to check in here — so MUCH has happened! The Balaton meeting is over, and so is a post-meeting workshop to move forward our project on indicators of sustainable development. Balaton meetings are unremitting periods of social and intellectual involvement. There isn’t a moment to go sit down with my computer — which is strange, because sitting alone with a computer is ordinarily a big part of my life.
At the moment I’m in the room Joan Davis and I have been sharing in the Hotel Petrol on the north shore of Lake Balaton. The name of the hotel has always been a great irony for us — in communist days this place was a resthouse for the oil and gas workers of the Hungarian state petroleum company. It’s still owned by that company, but now it’s an independent profit center, happy to sell its space to non-Hungarian tourists. We look forward to the day when its name is changed to Hotel Solar. Joan and I are packing up and getting ready to leave; it’s about an hour till we have to catch the train back to Budapest, so I have a minute to try to summarize this amazing week.
Imagine being together with 40 of your best friends; imagine that they are not only brilliant but dedicated to making the world a better place; imagine that they come from Botswana and New Zealand and India, and for all these reasons they have an enormous amount to teach you, on many levels. Some of them you’ve known for decades; some you’ve just met, but the newcomers magically fit in. You can watch them visibly relax, let go, and realize that this is somehow both a stellar professional meeting and a gathering of friends, who bring each other love, respect, and mutual support.
Now spend your mornings together in a concerted group discussion on a topic that stretches everyone’s understanding and leave the rest of the day open for whatever people cook up — ranging from a workshop comparing the structural adjustment problems of New Zealand, Hungary, Costa Rica, and the U.K. to a spontaneous evening cafe where we listen by candlelight to Alan AtKisson singing the ecstatic religious poems of Rainer Maria Rilke as translated by Joanna Macy. (These are amazing songs — the next day one of our new young members, Melita Rogalj from Slovenia told me they made tears stream down her cheeks. Then Melita — who is half Slovenian and half Serbian — told me of her work with the tattered remnants of the environmental movement in Serbia and Bosnia — and made tears stream down my cheeks.)
There were a lot of tears at this meeting, partly because one of our long-time members and friends, Wouter Biesiot from the Netherlands, has been told he has terminal cancer, and he was clearly spending precious energy to be with us. His presence was particularly poignant, because our plenary topic this year was TIME — a wild leap for us. Usually we talk about water management, or green cities, or ecological economics or some such topic on the leading edge of the global sustainability conversation. Finally (we’ve been talking about it for years) we got up the nerve to look at sustainability through the lens of Time — because sustainability is ABOUT being able to maintain systems for the long term, because Time is the driving force behind the dynamic models we make, and because Time is the resource in our own lives that we manage least well. Is Time something to “manage”? Is it a renewable or a nonrenewable resource? Why does the industrial world make Time so scarce? What does it mean that Time has become a commodity, with a price? How much Time do we have? These are some of the questions we wanted to raise.
Alan AtKisson started us off by catapulting us not only into Time, but into the perfect serious but light mode of a Balaton meeting. (We want to save the world, but there’s no reason to be stuffy about it.)
As you all know, this is the 116th annual meeting of the Balaton Group. The Group’s founders and earliest members have long since passed away, and yet they are still alive to us, because of the legacy they left behind, and the strong traditions they created. For 116 years, we have continued to meet annually here on the shores of Lake Balaton.
Most important for our purposes today, this is the 100th anniversary of the first Balaton Group Meeting devoted to the subject of Time. As you all know, that meeting — held August 28 to September 2, in the distant year 1997 — was recently determined by historiographers to have been pivotal. Their findings are recorded at the Annals of Sustainability site, time-stamped March 13, 2097, and those who have not yet read the article should consult your Multibooks later. Briefly, by performing a spatio-temporary cartographic analysis, supported by a complex five-dimensional dynamic model, a team of researchers at the Central European University determined that this meeting was one of the top 100 critical events near the turn of the century — events without which the world would not have made its successful, though difficult and still tenuous, transition to sustainability.
Alan invited us to consider why that meeting of 1997 was so pivotal, and offered to take us back in history via a Time-machine to relive the conference in simulated Time. He asked us to close our eyes, rang a bell — and the meeting got started.
The first day was about Time in complex systems. Some of our best modelers laid out the role of feedback delays, exponential growth, discontinuities and threshholds, evolution and self-organization, and what we can know about the dynamics of our global future and the Timeliness of our actions. (The really big problem is, the things we need to do — such as switch away from fossil fuels — take so long that by the time we’re all convinced to do it, it will be too late.)
Then came Time in biological and physical systems, especially the mind-boggling ways that very fast and very slow processes couple and uncouple from each other. We tried to imagine Time from the perspective of a mayfly that lives for a day, and Time from the perspective of a mountain. Wouter, who was once a nuclear engineer, brought in the important concept of Respite Time — the time you have before the nuclear power plant goes out of control — and Response Time — the time it takes you to analyze the situation and push the right buttons. The trick in designing nuclear plants is to shorten the Response Time and lengthen the Respite Time, so it’s physically possible to respond to an emergency in time. Then we applied that concept to environmental problems. It wasn’t a reassuring day. Our social and economic response times are long. Our environmental respite times are getting shorter and shorter.
We went on to Time in economic systems, including an examination of the way peoples’ time is co-opted to keep the economic system going — not only by work, but by shopping and TV. Americans spend 3-4 hours a day on average hooking themselves to the propaganda machines in their living rooms — that’s about half of all their disposal time. No wonder they feel rushed!
A lot of interesting history came in here, and cross-cultural insights. Aromar Revi, our brilliant young engineer from India talked about the “colonization of time” by the industrial culture. Dennis Meadows led a time-management workshop, where we talked about the demands on our own time, and what to do about it. Balaton Group members are almost entirely professionals who love their work and don’t have their time “colonized” by oppressive jobs. But it came as a revelation to many of them, especially the younger ones, that they could pursue their own agenda and didn’t have to fulfill every request that comes in from everyone else. (I can remember when that idea was a revelation to me. I thought I had to be nice to everyone by giving them all the time they wanted– until they wanted more time than I had, and I was forced to learn to say no.)
John de Graaf, a producer of public broadcasting documentaries — including one I hope you all just watched this month, called “Affluenza” — talked about time in the media. The average soundbite has shrunk from 42 seconds to 9 seconds. The number of “technical events” (camera switches, new images) per minute is 3-4 on public TV (boring), 10 in normal programming, 20 in commercials and Sesame Street, and 60 on MTV.
John Mothibi from Botswana expressed the confusion of a culture where in the countryside time is “frozen,” but in the city and along the railroad line people are being told that time is money. Ana Baez, who runs ecotourism projects in Costa Rica told of the frustration of dealing with tour guides who work until they have enough money and then suddenly stop — she can’t decide whether to try to make them become dependable, or to leave them alone. Chirapol Sintunawa talked about how “family” and “leisure” time have taken new meaning (and shrunk) in response to Thailand’s fast-paced “development.” Zoltan Lontay contrasted the differences in time under communism and capitalism in Hungary. Under communism there seemed to be lots of time; the work day was rigidly structured; people had a right to refuse overtime; but you had to spend time in communist party meetings. Under capitalism those who can compete on the labor market can now exchange their time for money — and do so frantically, because everything is so unstable, and money seems the only form of security. Meanwhile those who don’t have competitive skills are unemployed and uncared for and have plenty of time, except for the fact that life expectancy is plummeting; for men in Budapest it’s now under 60 years. (From personal observation I would guess that’s from a combination of air pollution and smoking.)
Alan appointed me the final speaker, with the topic “Have we got enough Time?” (To get onto a sustainable track before ecosystems and our social worlds collapse.) I went through our world model and other such models to look at how much time they say we have (30-50 years) and started to get into what, technically, “running out of time” looks like on a global level. Then, in a surprise for everyone, I had Betty interrupt me with an emergency “fax,” which asked us all to close our eyes, listen for the sound of the bell, and catapult back to the year 2097. Posing as a speaker at that future conference, I concluded:
I think those early and obviously clueless, but really rather sweet Balaton members of 1997 came closest to a breakthrough when they took to heart the realization that the difficult transition ahead of them required not only their minds and rationality, but also their hearts and souls — and their ability to act in community and with love. I wanted to cheer whenever words like SOLIDARITY and SELF-DETERMINATION and COMPASSION and HONESTY went up on that strange little projector they used. I was moved above all when they began to take the discussion to their personal lives, when they realized that they couldn’t fight against the abuse of time if they themselves abused time, just as they couldn’t counter the abuse of resources while they themselves abused resources. I was amazed at how often, throughout the meeting, they spoke of balancing “inner” and “outer” work, of trying to become living examples of the kind of world they so passionately wanted to bring into being.
Of course we know now that this embracing of all human faculties was indeed the central key to the sustainability revolution. Even now, for us, in a culture that encourages inner and outer balance in every way, it is a constant challenge to maintain our equilibrium. Imagine how much harder it was for them, leaving their meeting and returning to their world of rushing vehicles and ringing telephones and no cultural respect for quiet time or even family time. They probably all forgot their good resolutions and went back to their over-hectic pace within a week. But, having made those resolutions once, they must have had opportunities now and then to remember them, to take them up again, to share their struggle with others, and maybe even to carve out small places and times in their homes, their workplaces, their lives where they worked on balance and tried to encourage others to do the same — paving the way for social acceptance of the far better trained and more personally realized leaders that we know came in the very next generation.
Well, that was fun and magical. The whole group followed up with a long discussion in which they kept themselves in the 21st century and talked about how they felt, looking back on that 100-years-ago meeting. Somehow talking about themselves as if they were distant observers allowed them to open their hearts in a way we never before achieved in these meetings of mainly scientists from many cultures. And pretending to look back on a successful sustainability transition forced a positive frame of workability, of real problem-solving. It was a great rare moment — I was afraid to breathe, for fear that I’d either break the mood or burst into tears.
When Alan opened with the 2097 game (which was the idea of Joanna Macy), I remember thinking, “wow! He’s going to Go For It!” — meaning push us to make the meeting more than an intellectual exercise, more than a fun time, something intended to go beyond Gesture into Real Difference-Making. So I ended in the same vein, grateful for the reminder that there’s never any excuse, in any activity, not to Go For It.
I haven’t told you about swimming in the lake, or singing songs from many countries, or our awards banquet, or the many hugs, or the long, deep talks with Wouter. It was such an intense mix of happiness and sadness, foolery and utter seriousness, mind and heart and soul.
On the last free afternoon six of us — from Hungary, Canada, the U.S., Costa Rica, Lithuania, and Scotland — took off for an expedition to Babolna, which must be the biggest farm in Hungary, if not all of Europe. I wanted to see it because I’m writing about it in my textbook as an example of industrialized agriculture, which it turned out to be, far more than I had expected. For several centuries Babolna was the stud farm for the royal Hungarian army, famous for its war horses. After World War II and communism, the central planners turned it into a supermodern chicken and pig breeding farm. Now, with 60,000 acres and 6500 workers, it’s involved in joint ventures with Western agribusiness and fast-food businesses. It exports planeloads of day-old baby chicks to Saudi Arabia and South America. It provides 70% of the eggs eaten in Hungary, and 25% of the chicken meat, including the supply for McDonald’s McNuggets. Its managers are eagerly plotting how to configure the business for Hungary’s entry into the European Union — but they couldn’t tell me a thing about what pesticides are used on Babolna’s tens of thousands of acres of continuous corn. It was interesting. These business-heads seem almost unaware that their product has any connection whatever with the soil.
We were impressed with Babolna (it’s a careful, coordinated, capital-rich operation — and it still has 200 gorgeous thoroughbred stallions) and appalled (except for the prize horses, animals are treated like widgets; it’s a long way from sustainable agriculture).
Well, the bus pulled out for Budapest and ten of us stayed on for a two-day meeting to complete our joint paper on indicators of sustainable development. In some ways this was the opposite of the Balaton meeting. We had a product to get out. We bore down, we argued, we worked from 8 AM to 10 PM with almost no singing. But our fights were good, because we know where we stand with each other. We can attack each others’ ideas and still know, from years of working together, how deeply we respect one another. It isn’t often that I get to plunge into that kind of challenging, dedicated working partnership.
We came out with plans, I am sorry to say, for five publications on indicators, two of which are drafted and should be ready soon. The other three are completely new, just gleams in our eyes. This group is too creative for its own good. The good news is that I only have to write one of the five, and it’s one that’s already drafted. The bad news is that the Balaton Group seems to be about to start publishing its own documents for the first time ever, and I’m in charge of quality control.
Oh well. The group is maturing from an informal, simple network to a self-organizing international presence. It was inevitable that we’d reach this point.
September 9, 1997, Wallisellen, Switzerland
I’m sitting in Joan’s house, which is six minutes from the Zurich airport, so Swissair jets are taking off above my head — boy, cities are noisy! But Swiss cities are clean and orderly, and out here on the urban edge they consist of sloping-roofed, balconied gingerbread houses, each surrounded with a postage-stamp garden full of fruit trees and grapevines and roses. I enjoy going for walks just to peer at the gardens. If I walk about half an hour straight uphill, I come to what Europeans call a “forest” (a lot of trees, all the same species and age) and, on rare clear days, a view of the gleaming, snow-covered Alps.
Joan and I get along like sisters, though we’re different in many ways. I’m fat and she’s slim, I’m blunt and she’s subtle, I’m logical and she’s intuitive, I hate clutter and she surrounds herself with it. (Her clutter is much more artistic than my clutter.) We both like to live on dark Swiss bread and cheese and cucumbers and tea, and play Schubert and work on our computers all day, breaking to go on walks or to have explosive chats about things — mainly about the Balaton Group, to which we are both devoted. Since I’m used to taking farming breaks, I go out into her yard and pull weeds or pick apples.
I’ve been working on the Balaton Bulletin, which should come out shortly after I get home next week. It takes a lot longer to write up the Balaton meeting than it does to attend it, but I’m making progress. It’s a good idea to come here and hole up and get it done. Normally I plunge back into life at home and peck away at the Bulletin in my spare time, and it takes weeks. This time it will take just a few days, and I have Joan to spur my memory or talk over the meaning of the presentations.
Alan AtKisson will join us here tomorrow, and we’ll plan our forthcoming trip to Munich, to work with the Munich Agenda 21 group (whom I met when I was there last December) and to see — finally — I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time — Karl Ludwig Schweisfurth’s organic farm at Herrmannsdorf.
September 12, 1997, on the train from Munich to Zurich
Wow! Was THAT ever fun!
Joan and Alan and I hopped a train yesterday to Munich. (Oh, for a European train system in the States — clean, quiet, prompt, fast, densely interconnected. Joan runs five blocks down the hill from her house to the Wallisellen train station, from which she can get to anywhere.) Over the neat Swiss and Bavarian countryside, with blue outlines of high mountains in the distance, to Munich, then a tram to the Nymphenburg Palace — one of those amazing Versailles-like European grandiosities, surrounded by acres of park and fountains and statues and ponds and swans.
The Schweisfurth Foundation sits in one corner of the ground “rondell” in front of the palace, in a restored mansion that once probably housed some noble of the Bavarian Court. On the outside it still looks historic. On the inside it’s a spotless glass-and-wood-and-steel office and meeting place, studded with modern art.
We met with about 10 city officials and citizens who are part of a 300-city network trying to implement Agenda 21 — the mandate for sustainable development coming out of the 1992 Rio Conference. In some ways Munich’s progress in this direction is stunning. There is a target to reduce the city’s carbon dioxide emissions by 30% by the year 2005. (They were worried that the target won’t be met, but I was impressed that it’s even THERE — in the U.S. it’s impossible to get anyone to talk seriously about keeping CO2 emissions even constant, much less cutting them!) The city water department is subsidizing 100 farmers in the watershed from which municipal water comes to switch to organic farming, so there will be no chemical runoff into the water supply. It’s much cheaper to subsidize the farmers than to treat contaminated water to make it drinkable.
This is an amazing level of whole-system and long-term understanding. But there was some despair in the room. The traffic planners are asking for a huge expenditure on 3 tunnels to speed up traffic flows, and it doesn’t seem possible to stop them with sustainability arguments. The effort to institutionalize city-level sustainability indicators is flagging. Alan, who is “Mr. Sustainability Indicators,” first for Sustainable Seattle, and then on a national level for Redefining Progress, told them about the many indicator projects in the U.S. Since, of course, no city in the world (nor region, nor country) is even CLOSE to sustainability, we can’t tell anyone what to do. We can only commiserate, share our stories, pass around ideas, and stay networked. That’s what we were there for; that’s what we did.
The next morning we went to Herrmannsdorf. I was so excited I could hardly decide which direction to point my camera first. Herrmannsdorf, about 20 miles outside Munich, is Karl Ludwig Schweisfurth’s agricultural vision. Karl Ludwig was the founder of Herte, the biggest, most mechanized, centralized, industrialized meat-packing industry of Europe — the equivalent of Hormel or Armour Star. Then he realized that the food he sold was raised, processed, frozen, packaged in a way that kills the land, degrades the animals, and fails to nourish the consumer.
So he sold it all (or almost all, Joan tells me) and put his money into the Schweisfurth Foundation, which supports sustainable agriculture (and generously supported our new farm), and into Herrmannsdorf. Herrmannsdorf consists of about 500 acres of rolling, fertile Bavarian plain, plus small-scale processing and marketing facilities that turn produce from that farm and many others in the area into extremely high-quality organic food. The food is all marketed at the peak of its flavor, never more than 30 km away from the farms that grew it.
So there it was, neatly packaged. (It’s amazing what one can do with lots and lots of money.) Fields growing wheat and corn and rye and hay. A sweet little piggery, with the animals in clean, spacious pens, able to sleep in the sunlight or tunnel in the shade, turning out 20 hogs a week for the immaculate butchery (which also processes organically raised animals from other farms). Hams and bacons and sausages are smoked and stored in underground coolers. There’s a cheese factory, which turns out Parmesan and Camembert and Emmentaler and farmer’s cheese and creme fraiche to die for, all from organic milk delivered daily by 6 nearby farmers. Again underground storage chambers, aging each kind of cheese to perfection.
A beautiful bakery that grinds whole organic wheat and rye daily and bakes it up with carefully maintained sourdough cultures. A little brewery that buys organic barley and hops from 30 local farmers and turns out the best beer I have ever tasted, bottled in returnable bottles with a label showing a pig wearing a pearl necklace. A 5-hectare permaculture garden grows organic vegetables and fruits. A cheerful restaurant serves this food, and a shop sells it (there are 7 more shops in Munich, with 2 more built every year). All done in the Schweisfurth style, clean, “green” architecture, natural materials, sculptures and paintings everywhere. Behind the complex of buildings is a constructed wetland sewage-treatment plant with graceful flow-forms to be sure the water runs from one pond to another through swoops like a mountain stream, so the water is properly structured and aerated. A biogas plant turns organic waste into natural gas, which provides 20% of the electricity and heat for the whole complex. (The other 80% comes from an oil-powered co-generation unit.)
We spent all day there, asking millions of questions, Karl Ludwig discoursing on his new-found philosophy of keeping the LIFE in soil and food, so it transfers life to the eater. And really, the food from Herrmannsdorf is amazing. Alan couldn’t believe his taste-buds. “Maybe it’s the power of suggestion,” he said, after we had finished a breakfast of sourdough rolls, thin-sliced premium ham, astonishing cheeses, and buttermilk, “but my body really feels different with this kind of food in it.”
Karl Ludwig has poured his heart and fortune into Herrmannsdorf. It’s unduplicatable. But, being a businessman at heart, he’s figuring out how to franchise it, so there can be many such centers, stimulating and rewarding organic farmers, and serving local markets. He’s aiming to built another Herrmannsdorf in Hannover in north Germany for a coming World’s Fair, and a third near Dusseldorf.
I’d love to create a branch in Vermont some day! For our new community such a dream will have to happen very slowly. We don’t have Schweisfurth-level capital to plunk down, nor do we have a high-priced European food market to sell into, where people both appreciate and afford really high quality food. But the dream is lovely. We can work it out gradually. (I’d be delighted just to have the micro-brewery or the bakery, which Karl Ludwig says are the easy parts to manage. The cheese-making is the hardest and least profitable, he says, because he makes so many kinds, and they are made from raw milk, because pasteurization takes away the life. That makes quality control really difficult. The butchery is the most profitable part of the enterprise — but that’s where Karl Ludwig’s experience and heart are — not mine.)
Well, it’s a great model. If any of you get to Munich, by all means go see Herrmannsdorf, or find one of the stores in the city and try some of that great food. See if it makes your body feel different.
September 14, 1997, train from Zurich to Salzburg
I took this train on purpose, because I love, love, love to go through the Alps. We have just crossed the Swiss-Austrian border into Bludenz, and we’re climbing steeply from an ever-narrowing valley into dark green walls of forest, scarred with rocky landslide paths. The bright green pastures below us are studded with brown cows and perfect little chalets, wooden balconies lined with flowers. How did this part of the world ever evolve such a beautiful style of human habitation?
Here’s another great model, as we start our new farm in a cold mountain region like this, where forests and grass are the main resources. (Along with beauty!) People have lived simple but good and sustainable lives here for centuries. (The worst threats to the resources seem to be the modern hydropower and tourist industries.) I can see piles of hand-cut hay stooked up over upright posts (it has to be handcut — it’s too steep for machines) and small water-driven sawmills and beautiful Swiss Brown cows everywhere. Little huts are scattered through the fields, with racks under the roofs so the hay can be hung up to dry out of the rain and then pitched into the hut for storage. This is really small-scale haymaking!
The streams up here run fast and gray-green with glacier-dust. Now I can see the high mountains, thrusting up behind, bare rock and at the tops the remnants of old snow. I think we’re getting near Imst. I’d like to get off the train at one of these small villages and just stay forever.
September 15, 1997, Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Austria
Well, I didn’t yield to that impulse; I stayed on the train till it came over the mountains to the green rolling countryside of the Salzkammergut and the beautiful old city of Salzburg — truly this is one of the most gorgeous parts of the world. Here I plunged into yet another world: European business.
I’m sitting in one of the many restored palaces of Austria, looking out over a (highly eutrophied) lake with a craggy mountain rising behind. This is the site of the Salzburg Seminars, a U.S.-European set of conferences. I’m here for a meeting on business and sustainability. It’s the kind of meeting I would never go to — can you imagine the waste of time and fossil fuel to bring me to Europe to give a 20-minute talk? — except that it also pays my way to the Balaton meeting. And it’s a nice bonus that two friends are here, Rob Horsch of Monsanto and Jørgen Randers, our partner on Beyond the Limits and The Limits to Growth, now working at the World Wildlife Fund near Geneva. It’s great to see Jørgen again after a long, long time and to enjoy listening to his charming Norwegian accent and his bright mind at work. He’s telling good news stories about WWF’s certification programs for sustainable forest and fish harvesting and about its Gifts to the Earth program, which is getting major habitats protected in many parts of the world.
Other than that, this is a disheartening meeting. Well, that’s not fair — actually I guess it’s a typical meeting, maybe better than most. These are industry people (with a scattering of government and green NGO folks, and a few special invitees from Hungary and Croatia and Poland and other “European developing countries”) who at least have enough interest to take 5 days to talk about sustainable development. It’s only in contrast to Balaton that I find the pace slow, the thinking sloppy, and the egos too much on parade.
I was asked to talk about scientific uncertainty, but after listening to the first day’s discussion I threw out what I had planned and did a riff on economic uncertainty instead, telling them why, from a systems point of view, the market system is the major cause of both unsustainability and poverty, and how it had to be restructured so it can have any hope of producing a world any of us would want to live in. I pretty well trashed cost-benefit analysis, risk analysis, free trade theory, the GDP, and the religion of growth — all of which was too much to do in 20 minutes. I guess they mostly didn’t understand what I was saying but knew that they didn’t like it. Anyway, I woke them up and started a good discussion. Some day I have to get more systematic about attacking market economics from a systems point of view. Market economics doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny at all, but it has somehow made itself immune to disproof — so all these business types worry about scientific uncertainty, while the total falsity of the theory of comparative advantage (which Herman Daly has shown nicely), or the model of the free market, or the idea of discounting, doesn’t seem to bother them at all.
Anyway, they don’t seem to like to keep the speakers hanging around to interfere with the deliberations of the participants; so I’m about to catch a train back to Zurich and Joan’s house. Tomorrow I fly home!!! I can hardly wait!!!
September 21, 1997, Plainfield NH
And here I am! Beginning to dig out from 3 weeks of mail and to catch up with the farm, which moves fast at this time of year. It’s a shame to miss 3 whole weeks of harvest season, a time of beautiful clear days, increasingly frosty nights, and lots to do all at once.
The apples have ripened and are waiting for me to pick them and take a truckload to be crushed into cider. (Yum!) I canned some tomatoes last night. Ruth’s barn floor is covered with drying onions. Stephen is busy spreading horse manure on the new acre he’s going to open up to double his production next year. Mary’s been picking green beans by the million. Chrissie is nearly finished moving to Ruth’s house next door. Scot is in the wilds of British Columbia measuring trees. All animals are well; I have to move the sheep to new pasture today and separate out the ram lambs before they get around to discovering that they’re able to make babies.
A flock of 22 wild turkeys has appeared — the first we’ve ever seen turkeys around here — to graze on Ruth’s pasture and invade Stephen’s garden. Stephen says he heard a bear a few nights ago. I heard the wild geese flying south this morning. The critters are stirring, fattening and preparing for the hard part of the year — and so must we be.
I’ll catch you up on the community and other stuff next time, when I get caught up.
Love, Dana
P.S. The Valley News chose not to run one of my columns this month, for reasons that will become obvious when you read it. I shouldn’t write columns when I’m mad, I guess. If it had run, it would have come out on the Saturday when Princess Diana was killed, which made my point much more spectacularly than I ever could.
